EPA relaunches website tracking climate change indicators

Major indicators of climate change in the past three years include the loss of Alaskan permafrost, more severe summer heat waves in U.S. cities and the recession of winter ice in the Great Lakes, according to data released Wednesday by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA on Wednesday announced the relaunch of its website tracking climate change indicators in the U.S. for the first time since the beginning of the Trump administration. The assessment, delayed under the Trump presidency, includes information on 54 phenomena associated with climate change, including temperature increases, flooding, droughts, rising sea levels and ocean acidity.

The data indicate that U.S. heat waves have increased from an average of two per year in the 1960s to six per year in the 2010s, while sea levels have risen relative to land as high as 8 inches on parts of the U.S. coastline since 1960. Another indicator, the average length of growing seasons, has increased an average of over two weeks in the 48 contiguous states since the early 1900s.

“EPA’s Climate Indicators website is a crucial scientific resource that underscores the urgency for action on the climate crisis,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement. “With this long overdue update, we now have additional data and a new set of indicators that show climate change has become even more evident, stronger, and extreme – as has the imperative that we take meaningful action.”

“We want to reach people in every corner of this country because there is no small town, big city or rural community that’s unaffected by the climate crisis,” he told reporters Wednesday. “Americans are seeing and feeling the impacts up close with increasing regularity.”

Trump repeatedly falsely claimed human-caused climate change was a hoax, and under his administration, the EPA delayed updating the peer-reviewed indicators report. The updated findings come two months after the Biden White House relaunched an EPA climate change website that the Trump EPA had shuttered.